


Sonder

by Moopster



Category: No Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:02:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29788224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moopster/pseuds/Moopster





	Sonder

Sonder. It’s a word that not many people know.

And it’s the knowing that every passerby has a life as complex and meaningful as your own.

That woman down the street holding her bags?

She has five kids and she’s struggling to feed them all.

She works hours a day. Odd jobs when she needs them.

She’s struggling. She’s hurting. But she dreams.

She dreams of a life where her children can be happy.

Where she can live out her days not having to worry if the electricity will shut off.

If the hot water will run cold. If the food will go bad and she won’t have enough money to buy more.

She dreams of the impossible and when she wakes up every morning, she cries. 

The man with his phone pressed against his ear?

No yeah, that’s his father on the line. Breathing down his neck.

That’s his father. The man who raised him. 

Showed him how to be a real boy. Whatever that means. 

He holds himself high as he’s pelted at with insults. 

From the man who showed him how to drive a car.

How to swim. How to play baseball.

He never liked baseball. 

And all he wants to do is run away. Throw down the phone. 

Smash it to pieces.  
But he can’t. So he lets himself be stepped on, by the man who taught him to fight back whenever he can. 

The boy on the corner of the street?

He’s homeless.

Got kicked out when he was fourteen by his sister who brought him to church on Sundays and made him pray at the dinner table.

Got kicked out for kissing a boy in the hayloft.

Got kicked out for wishing he could be who he was without judgement.

Got kicked out for believing too much in the cold heart of his sister.

He believed she would have been kind.

He was wrong and he now sits on the pavement, crying his eyes out and asking for money. 

He’s desperate. He’s in pain.

And I’ve seen too many faces and too much suffering and too many lost stories not to tell you that sonder is the feeling you get when you walk down the street in the rain. 

When you’re going through that grinding rough patch that makes you want to tug out your hair and claw your eyes out of your skull. Sonder is when you look down from your small apartment balcony and lock eyes with someone below. And for a split second it’s like you’re connected. 

And then they’re gone. 

So you wonder what is going on inside their heads. Where are they going? What are they doing? 

Why are they here when they could be anywhere in the world, but they’re underneath your apartment building in your city on your street and you see into their soul for that small fraction of time. 

Sonder. A word which makes me think of multitudes of suffering. 

Because no one knows what’s happening in someone’s mind.   
A battle could be raging. 

A storm could be stirring. 

Police sirens could be wailing. 

Everyone has a life and a mind and a story that is as fucked up as your own. 

So take that however you want.

But sonder is the knowing that every passer-by has a life as deep and meaningful as your own.


End file.
